Sarah Murray


(Sarah Maze, Sarah Aust)

1744 - 1811

English traveller. Born in Batheaston (Somerset), she moved to London in 1783 and married William Murray, the youngest son of William Murray, 3rd Earl of Dunmore (1696 - 1756), who was a captain in the British Navy but died on Christmas Day just three years later. In 1796 she set off on a five-month tour of the English Lake District and Scotland, accompanied by a maid and a man-servant, with the aim of "seeing everything worth seeing". She visited Hawick, Selkirk, Edinburgh, Stirling, Callander, Aviemore, Inverness, Fort William, Glasgow, Lanark, Lockerbie and many sights in between, and wrote her notable Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland, which was published in 1799. She undertook an even more extensive tour of Scotland 1799-1802 and published A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties in the Western Highlands of Scotland, and in the Hebrides (1803), which explored the islands of Mull, Ulva, Staffa, Iona, Tiree, Coll, Eigg, Skye, Raasay and Scalpay. These books described the landscape, but also examined the condition of the people and the roads. She married again in 1803. Her second husband was George Aust (1740 - 1829), a childhood friend and retired Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office. Murray died in Kensington and was buried next to her first husband in St. Mary Abbots Church, Kensington.


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